The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters

Front Cover
The New Press, Nov 5, 2013 - History - 448 pages
During the Cold War, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy's most cherished possession—but such freedom was put in service of a hidden agenda. In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders reveals the extraordinary efforts of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were working for or subsidized by the CIA—whether they knew it or not.

Called "the most comprehensive account yet of the [CIA's] activities between 1947 and 1967" by the New York Times, the book presents shocking evidence of the CIA's undercover program of cultural interventions in Western Europe and at home, drawing together declassified documents and exclusive interviews to expose the CIA's astonishing campaign to deploy the likes of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock as weapons in the Cold War. Translated into ten languages, this classic work—now with a new preface by the author—is "a real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period" (The Wall Street Journal), and its story of covert cultural efforts to win hearts and minds continues to be relevant today.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
1 Exquisite Corpse
7
2 Destinys Elect
27
3 Marxists at the Waldorf
38
4 Democracys Deminform
48
5 Crusadings the Idea
62
6 Operation Congress
72
7 Candy
88
Insert
234
17 The Guardian Furies
235
18 When Shrimps Learn to Whistle
254
19 Achilles Heel
264
20 Cultural NATO
275
21 Caesar of Argentina
289
22 Pen Friends
302
23 Literary Bay of Pigs
310

8 Cette Fête Américaine
95
9 The Consortium
108
10 The Truth Campaign
122
11 The New Consensus
131
12 Magazine X
138
13 The Holy Willies
159
14 Music and Truth ma non troppo
179
15 Ransoms Boys
197
16 Yanqui Doodles
212
24 View from the Ramparts
320
25 That Sinking Feeling
329
26 A Bad Bargain
343
Epilogue
351
Notes
361
Select Bibliography
401
Index
405
Copyright

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About the author (2013)

Frances Stonor Saunders is the author of The Devil’s Broker and The Woman Who Shot Mussolini. She has worked as the city editor of the New Statesman; writes and presents for BBC radio; and has written for Areté, The Guardian, Lapham’s Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in London.

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